A Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) load balancer is a device that distributes WAP traffic received over a wireless network on a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) bearer network among a group of WAP gateways. Each WAP gateway translates requests from the WML stack to a WWW protocol stack, such as HTML and TCP/IP. The WAP gateway encodes and decodes web content to reduce the size and number of packets traveling over the wireless network. The WAP gateway interfaces with subscriber databases in order to provide client specific services.
Because of the growth and size of the wireless subscriber market, content customers providing WAP services are quickly experiencing more bottlenecks at their WAP gateways. The WAP load balancer is used to distribute WAP traffic among WAP gateways in order to relieve and avoid bottlenecks in the system.
A Wireless Session Protocol (WSP) is a session layer protocol for operation between a WAP client and a WAP gateway. The WSP provides connection oriented and connection-less oriented session services with optional security to upper level application layers. For a connection oriented service, the client establishes a reliable session with a server and releases that session in an orderly manner. The association between client and server session is with a session identifier. The WAP gateway maintains the session state based on the session identifier for all session management packets.
With multiple WAP gateways, the WAP load balancer must ensure that all packets associated with a single session are sent to the same WAP gateway. This becomes problematic when a gateway re-directs a request to a different port and/or Internet Protocol address in order to obtain the necessary information to satisfy the request. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to re-direct a request in a multiple gateway environment.